And, since it’s Friday, here’s your chaser…
FEDERAL INTERNATIONAL TRADE ADMINISTRATION ANTIDUMPING DUTY REVIEW OF THE DAY: “Certain Carbon Steel ButtWeld Pipe Fittings From Thailand: Final Results of Changed Circumstances Antidiumping Duty Review“
opening a bar entitled “ButtWeld Pipe Fittings” at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com
Categories: Your Tax Dollars At Work
I had waaaaaaaaaaaaaay better crying to do last night than watching the speech.
I would never want to be the Cabinet secretary who has to sit out. How do they arrive at this decision? Names out of a hat? Round of Rochambeau? “Well, if it’s a nuke, Bob, we think that you, like the cockroach, have the best chance of ground-level survival.”
montage! at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com
Categories: The Side Dish
Total Dork UPDATE: The circut is now complete– after five years of blogging on various platforms, I have at last landed on one which allows comment threads. Ooooooh.
Categories: Concerning Truly Major World Events · The Side Dish · Things Which Do Not Suck · What You Need to Know About This Movie
Rachel The Reader wants to know if the announcement of a new embryo in our 
midst is going to trigger a Fetus Naming Contest, as we enjoyed when the most recent fetus in question, Schnitzel, turned out to be Will The Smaller Child Nephew. It’s a Blonde Champagne tradition which began with Jim The Small Child Nephew, who for many months was known as “Taufling,” because if there’s one thing an English major hates, it’s the inability to assign gender to a sentient being.
Good thinking, Rachel! This shows you are indeed a very loyal The Reader who pays close attention, reads regularly, and is clearly in need of professional help. However, there was a runner-up to Schnitzel, one which I kept in an emergency sister-reproduction Ziplock bag for just this occasion. That name was “Fohlen,” and it’s already been deployed:
See, once it’s in the BabyCenter Spawn Tracker, I’m afraid it’s official. BabyCenter.com OWNS YOU until the age of nine, at which point you are briefly handed over to the Tween Division of the Walt Disney Corporation, until your life is claimed by Abercrombie & Fitch. Then? The Scooter Store.
BabyCenter.com has no options for crazy-meds aunts. In order to creepily track the development of children not my own, I needed to register, and all women are registered the same way, which produced such horrifying InterWeb moments as the following:
And then when I log in to see which type of produce Fohlen is resembling these days (this week: a lentil bean!), this pops up:
“I’m pregnant” is the default. I DON’T NEED THIS at six o’ clock in the morning. Because while I was unmarried and in my twenties when Jim’s presence was made known to me, I’ve now pushed past thirty, but remain terrifyingly fertile. I mean, these German peasant hips weren’t just produced for the viewing pleasure of Sir Mix-A-Lot.
you ain’t it, miss thang at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com
Categories: Aunt Beth
So last week I got this phone call on my cell. My parents’ home number. I was changing clothes but answered anyway; my mother has seen me in far worse states than half-dressed. Barfed-on, for one. She won’t care if I’m talking to her from four states away in my underwear.
“Hi Aunt Beeeeeth!”
Well, now I have to put clothes on.
“Hello, Jim!”
There was a voice in the background. “What do you have to tell Aunt Beth?”
“I…I’m gonna be a big brother!”
“You… wha?”
“A baaaaby! I’m going to have a baby.”
“…Put your mother on.”
“Hello?”
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING BEING PREGNANT. I THOUGHT YOU WERE DONE BEING PREGNANT.”
“Ha!”
“I WATCHED YOU AT CHRISTMAS. YOU WERE DRINKING WINE. THERE’S NO WAY YOU’RE PREGNANT WITHOUT ME GUESSING THAT YOU’RE PREGNANT.”
She’s, like, a minute and a half along, but spreading the news because four year old + two year old + morning sickness apparently kind of sucks.
Meanwhile, Will The Smaller Child Nephew was clad in his own Youngest Doom:
If his shirt looks familiar, that’s because it appeared on the original Blonde Champagne about three years ago:
“Poor Will,” Josh The Pilot said when he beheld how his nephew was attired. “Even his birth announcement tee shirt is a hand-me-down.”
I prefer to think of it as “carrying on tradition, as long as you define ‘tradition’ as mega-cuuuuuute,” but the man has a point. Despite the fact that Josh and I immediately elected to use the event as an excuse to find a bar so as to toast my sister’s fertility, it came with the sobering implication that Will is now a candidate for Jan Brady Syndrome.
I mean, I feel him. The smile and the wave, they’re killing me. He has no idea. You’ll notice the changing table behind him, which, incidentally, he still uses. That, and his crib, which he has made absolutely no attempt to climb out of and now has eight months to vacate. It’s a tough economy when two-year-olds are getting foreclosure notices. I would suggest to him a bailout application, but seeing as he still has in his possession the dollar bill his great-grandmother gave him last month, his income bracket is probably too high.
When I was a little girl, I was in constant fear that I would somehow lose my cherished place in the family as the baby, and could not understand how my mother was able to totally guarantee that this would never happen. Only a round of sex ed and the safe passage of menopause made me rest comfortably. But Will? He’s done.
However, at least he’s somewhat in practice: For months, he’s been attempting to shove the babies of various friends and cousins off of my sister’s lap with the admonition, “My mommy.” As prospects of pitting siblings against one another in a steel cage match of winning an aunt’s affection go, this is going to be awesome.
Jim is reportedly excited about the prospect of adding further minions to his sibling empire, and has announced the preference for a sister– probably, as as his mother points out, because she would be presumably uninterested in his fleets of cars and trains.
Then again, there are times we’d prefer that Jim enjoyed his brother’s blissful ignorance. Bedtime now has the added procedure of bidding goodnight to the baby in Mommy’s tummy. And last week, James looked up from his Lightning McQueen pillowcases and asked, “How’d the baby get in there?”
October 13 at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com
Categories: Aunt Beth
ESSENTIAL GOVERNMENT ENTITY OF THE DAY: The National Sheep Industry Improvement Center
It’s closed today, of course. So if the entire nation collapses due to the fact that all our sheep are slacking, you’ll be the first to know why.
Categories: Your Tax Dollars At Work
The Illinois State Society Inaugural Ball presented several different themes throughout the hotel where it was staged. We workers never got to see them, as we were busy constructing fences out of cardboard and preparing for the Colts opening home game.
One of them was “Illinois State Fair,” or: “Our State Produces Flat, Cardboard, and Yet Somehow Award-Winning Sheep!”
And… it was one of the most popular areas of the party.
I’m thinking the chocolate-covered cheesecake on a stick had something to do with it. Is there nothing the United States of America can’t suspend from a stick? That’s what makes this nation great.
Formal wear + cotton candy + open bar = a whole bunch of people standing in line at the liquor stations, and this was where the enormous amounts of people in attendance became a pro-public safety issue. You had to wait at least forty five minutes from shot to shot—the staff ran out of glassware about midnight, at which point we were forced to submit ourselves to the cycle of the kitchen’s dishwasher or start sucking the carpet fibers of the areas behind the bars. Of course, that was the signal for the party to end, because standing around wearing zirconium while consuming pure sugar from a rolled piece of paper can only get you so celebratory.
fair at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com
Categories: Dude.
DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT GOVERNMENTING QUOTE OF THE DAY: “For questions on access for the visually impaired, see the following…”
ABSOLUTELY INDISPENSABLE GOVERNMENT AGENCY OF THE DAY: The Committee for the Implementation of Textile Agreements of the Office of Textiles and Apparel
first in a very, very, very, very long series at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com
Categories: Your Tax Dollars At Work
I’ll tell you something else about the train. When it’s not a one-way sewage delivery system, it is a bar.
The second time I rode out of DC on the LEAVE LEAVE LEAVE Express, I noticed that the man seated in front of me was fully in possession of a tall boy, and, like, not even trying to hide it. You’re not even allowed to be in possession of your own body on the Metro, so I was first shocked, then amazed, then jealous, and then settled back into my default mode of tired and pissed. Lookit this, we got ourselves a happy hour on the Choo-Choo Bullet Train to Full-Blown Alcoholism!
But then on Monday I saw another man across the aisle deeply into a bottle of Bud, and then this evening a couple had already cracked open some abomination of a wine cooler before they were even seated and fully locked in the upright position.
Oh.
I’m allowed to drink on the train. I’m allowed. To drink. On the train. Which would explain the presence of a liquor store in the station, an amenity I found hilariously strange (it’s fully operable at seven in the morning) and initially noticed as That Place Across from the Auntie Anne’s with the Lotto Tickets—but then I began putting the GS 12’s and their shiny cans and the liquor store together and realized that capitalism is at least somewhere still in lovely full bloom in the nation’s capitol.
Of course, I won’t be drinking on the train, because I have a good twenty minute drive out from the station, and we all know that I drive with the approximate ability of a Michael Phelps’ Bloodstream Special even when stone sober. Pity; it seems the only way to begin the process of bringing oneself to begin the whole thing over again tomorrow anyway.
Then again, I walk from the station to work…
sipping at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com
Categories: Dude.
I’m a week into this now, and I’m sitting here at a weekend distance from beginning my sentence at the Department of Government Governmenting, attempting to assess the uberhighlight of the past five days:
-It could be the sad, slow realization that my life is now a Sheena Easton song.
-It could be the moment I asked my orientation trainer on Monday when my official start date was, as I was told that I wouldn’t have to report until my background check was complete, which I assure you had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I filed it at the rate of approximately one keystroke per day, and she answered, “Oh, today. Today is Day One.”
-It could have been each of the triplicate documents I processed which were filed in accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995.
-It could be my most recent application of the Get Ahead in Life by Telling the Whole Terrible Truth life rule, which apparently is how one gets ahead as a government employee. We went around the table full of Day One employees, introducing ourselves and why we were there:
“I’m going to be a curator at the new Nixon Presidential Library,” one said.
“I was promoted from another agency,” said another.
“I didn’t tank the interview enough,” I said.
-It could have been the moment when I was herded into the security office to be—fittingly—printed and mugshot.
-It could be the evening I checked our community center’s exercise class schedule to find out which workouts would fit into my new non-freelance life, and discovered that the very first one of the day, which commences at 5:45 AM, still ends too late for me to catch my train.
-It could be that every single time I introduced myself to one of my new co-workers and answered the inevitable “Are you a transfer from another division of Government Governmenting?” question with “Actually, I’m a freelance writer,” the reaction, to a person, was “Oh… no.” At least two of them said, “I kind of have a book done, but…” This was then followed by a trailing voice, rounded shoulders, and a defeated expression. The Office of Government Governmenting, it seems, is an abortion mill for literature of both fiction and non-.
-It could be the morning I challenged my to-date best off-the-field athletic feat, which was The Great Jim The Child Nephew Driveway Save, in which I heaved aside the enormous box I was carrying and ran many yards through grass in high heels to stop my godchild-on-a-push-toy from rolling ever faster down a driveway and into the street. Since I grade papers on the train, I was carrying a calculator in my coat pocket, as totaling the points from a ten-point rubric is well outside the envelope of my ability to add. As I bent to pick up my bag to board the train, I heard something plastic hit the metal guardrail of the platform, then strike the ground below. As I welcomed the excuse to avoid an hour of subjecting myself to such sentences as “The Author guy did a really nice job on this essay you could really understand where he/she was coming from?” I decided to retrieve it when I returned to the station that afternoon, and leaned over to check its position, only to discover that it was not, in fact, my calculator, but my cell phone, which had somehow slipped out of the magnetic casing on my purse. As the last passenger in front of me was climbing aboard, I flipped myself beneath the railing, grabbed the phone, placed it between my lips, and hauled myself back to the platform just as the engineer was in the process of hitching the door. This was also accomplished, I must add, in high heels, but the Russian judge screwed me on the artistic portion anyway.
-It could be the realization that I put a one hundred thousand dollar education to work organizing a filing cabinet.
-It could be the day I glanced at my train seatmate’s reading material, in the process discovering that it was a book entitled The Foreskin Diaries.
-It could be the morning I opened the closet to decide which part of my Office Barbie wardrobe would come to work with me that day, only to realize I’d already worn the entirety of it on Day One.
-It could be the day the toilet in my train overflowed, sending a cheery stream of sewage down the center of the car. However, I officially disqualified this candidate when I saw the guy across the aisle from me drop his Backberry right in the middle of it. It splashed and everything.
-It could be the afternoon one of the tech specialists summoned me to announce I had been assigned a login and password for the department software, but not one to permit me to boot any of the computers.
-It could be the moment I paged through the directory of the federal government and learned that I will work approximately four months out of the year to fund the likes of the New England Fishery Management Council, the Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board, and the United States Ambassador to Moldova.
-It could be the evening I disembarked from the train and paused to check that my laptop was secured well enough inside my bag. As it happened, it wasn’t, because it was still on board. I suck at commuting, you guys. In the first week, I have somehow managed to screw up getting on and off a train I’m not even running.
But to my rescue came the same conductor who had witnessed the Calculator Flip Spectacular, and by now understood the depth and breadth of my blondeness. He has since learned to hold the train until I’m well out of sight or on it for at least seventeen seconds. After that, I’m on my own.
THE TWO-OUNCE CHASER: Against my better judgment, I weighed myself on Sunday, terrified that a week of comfort food and the presence of an Auntie Anne’s Pretzel stand in the train station, all ingested without the mitigating presence of a single workout, had taken its toll. Instead, I had… lost two ounces. Well! Who knew tears weigh so much?
commuting at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com
Categories: Your Tax Dollars At Work
